Talking Food with Cory Bahr: Cornbread

Hey, I'm Chef Corey Bahr and today we're talking cornbread. Let's jump right in it. So this is actually a very special recipe. Today (Wednesday) would have been my grandparents' 72nd wedding anniversary. And this recipe actually came from their wedding book, you know, when they got married back in the day, you know, all your relatives and friends would write down recipes and one of them, you know, is the quintessential Southern recipe of cornbread. And this is actually the easiest recipe of cornbread I've ever come across.

It's a 'two of everything.' So we're going to start that off with two cups of cornmeal, two eggs, two cups of buttermilk. Use the full-fat stuff. Low-fat buttermilk tastes not great. All right, we're just going to pop that in there. Two teaspoons of salt and a teaspoon of baking soda. You don't want to mix this too much. You just want to fold it together.

While you're doing this. You need to be heating your cast iron skillet in the oven. We have ours in a 400-degree oven right now with a little bit of duck fat, but bacon fat, lard, whatever you've got, that'll work. Just don't use anything like olive oil. That wouldn't be great.

Like I said, this is one of the easiest recipes you can possibly make. Everybody's got to have a cornbread recipe in their repertoire. And this one is extremely special to me. This is the part you have to be careful with, but we've heated it up with a little bit of fat in there. This is the duck fat like I talked about. You just want to pour the cornbread in quickly. That's good. And you see that right there where it's frying around the edge. That's going to make that crispy crust that everybody loves. Man, this smells delicious.

So we're going to go straight back into the oven. 400 degrees for about 12 to 15 minutes. All right, well, our cornbread's cooking away in the oven. We're going to make up some Steen's cane syrup butter. It's salty and sweet goes great with this cornbread. In the theme of keeping it simple today and two ingredients really does the trick. This one's going to be three, but in this bowl, we got some unsalted butter.

That's about a half-pound of butter we're going to add a tablespoon of Steen's cane syrup. You can grab this at our local Brookshire's.

And then we're going to pop in a couple of pinches of kosher salt. You just want to mix that up really well and this goes great on anything. I mean, I'm telling you, you can put this on a biscuit, you can put this on a roll, you can put this on a bumper, it's going to taste great. You know cooking is something that's like born into me, I believe, you know, but cooking a recipe like this, that came from my grandparents, is, you know, on the, on the day they got married is a really special thing. So each and every time you guys out there cook this recipe, it'll be something special for me, really. To give away a recipe like this, you know, is a really personal thing. But I think sharing it with people and having people you know, see this and cook this recipe and enjoy it with their family and that would have made my grandparents really proud.

So there's one thing you got to do as soon as the cornbread comes out of the oven to keep that nice crunch on the bottom.

Let's take it out of your skillet. The smell makes me really happy. Look at that. Nice, light, airy. The next thing you got to do is get some of the Steen's cane syrup butter. Pop it right on there.

There you got it. My grandparents' recipe for the perfect cornbread. Hey if you want to cook this recipe for yourself, go to KNOE.com and click on Talking Food.